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Suddenly, everybody’s all about the consumer

If political parties were serious about consumer interest they would focus on those cases where consumers are genuinely being abused, which almost invariably stems from concentration of market power in the hands of a few producers.
Photo: Chris Young/The Canadian Press

The thing you have to understand is how very deeply every political party cares about the consumer. Why, you only have to listen to them.

The Conservatives, of course, have been banging on for some time about how committed they are to putting “consumers first.” So anxious are they to spread the news they’ve even commissioned television ads at your expense to tell you about it. Apparently for the past several years wireless telephone companies have been ripping you off, but now there’s a new government … er, that is, now the old government has a new plan … well, anyway, they’re concerned about it.

But don’t you think for one minute that the Official Opposition cares any less about consumers. NDP leader Tom Mulcair emerged from a strategy meeting this week to announce the party’s message in the coming weeks and months would be all about “affordability.” Indeed, he’ll be touring the country “to meet with Canadians in their homes … to discuss ways we can tackle staggering bills and skyrocketing household debt,” he told reporters.

Not that the party has not already heard from Canadians about what’s on their minds. And what’s on their minds, it seems, are the fees banks charge to use their automated banking machines. Also, the fees some companies charge to send you your bill in paper form. And have you checked the price of gas lately?

I’m not quite sure where to start with this. Is it the notion that there is a generalized “affordability” crisis — an assertion in stark conflict with the facts, or what the party is at other times pleased to call “evidence-based decision-making” — or the claim that it consists in such focus-grouped minutiae as ATM fees, or that ancient NDP hobbyhorse, gas prices? Perhaps it’s the whole idea that this represents some sort of new thinking on the party’s part.

If one were searching for ways in which the government might make life more affordable for Canadians, surely the price of food would be at the top of the list, or more particularly the prices of such dietary staples as eggs, chicken, and milk, for which consumers pay anywhere from two to three times the market price.

Or one might note the exorbitant price of air travel, compared with what it costs in the U.S. and Europe. Or the fees charged to manage Canadians’ savings, among the highest in the world. Or, yes, the absurd cost, relative to quality, of Canadian telephone and Internet service.

But then, to ask the government to lower prices in these cases would amount to asking it to refrain from propping them up, the proximate cause of the high prices of each — lack of competition — being a matter of government policy, notably in the form of barriers to foreign entry. Indeed, when it comes to supply-managed foods, the government organizes and enforces the price-fixing itself.

That’s an actual example of collusion, as opposed to the phoney one the NDP sees behind the price of gas. This charge is as antique as it is discredited — as no fewer than six Competition Bureau investigations have concluded — and based on the same condescending appeals to popular prejudice, a.k.a. what “everybody knows.”

“You don’t have to understand fine theory of competitive regulation,” Mulcair noted, in that spirit, “to understand that there’s collusion among gas companies when [prices] all go up by the same amount” — no, that’s what happens under competition: it’s when competition is weak that prices diverge — “or just as people are leaving on summer holidays.” That prices rise when demand peaks is not evidence of collusion, either. Or if it is, then why do prices fall?

It’s not serious, in other words, this newfound NDP concern for consumers, any more than the Conservatives are serious when they talk about such trifles as airline passenger bill of rights. If political parties were serious about the consumer interest they would focus on those cases where consumers are genuinely being abused, which almost invariably stems from concentration of market power in the hands of a few producers.

But as the producer interest is their real concern, they are commonly the sponsors of these abuses. The collusion that counts is not so much among producers, as between producers and the government: for competition cannot be restrained for long, as a rule, without the state’s help. And where consumers cannot be compelled to pay at the till — competition having unavoidably broken out — they are forced to pay in taxes, as in the endless cycle of subsidy and bailout that calls itself the Canadian auto industry.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, right, and Northwest Territories Premier Bob McLeod arrives at the construction site of the Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk highway in Inuvik, N.W.T., Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2014. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward

There are a number of explanations for this observed tendency to favour the producer interest over the consumer, but one is elemental. A truly consumer-first, competition-based approach is at odds with the professional interests of politicians, which is at all times to justify their own indispensability, not only as a species but in their special identities as New Democrats or Conservatives. Rather than empower consumers, then, they are obliged to insist that consumers are weak, helpless without the interventions of their Lord Protectors. After all, if it could be left to the impersonal forces of the market, what reason would there be to elect one party over the other?

And yet the whole project of liberal democracy is founded on just that — on structural, rules-based means of protecting the public interest that do not depend on who’s in power: competition, rather than regulation; the rule of law, rather than of men; dispersing power, rather than concentrating it.

The sort of populism being peddled by the NDP and the Conservatives is in diametric conflict with this. It is fundamentally illiberal, dedicated to the proposition that more and more power must be concentrated in the hands of a few elected champions, with a maximum of discretion to intervene as they see fit: needlessly, expensively, self-servingly, but above all heroically.

A National Post original, Andrew Coyne's journalism career has also included positions with Maclean's, the Globe and Mail and the Southam newspaper chain. In addition, he has contributed to a wide range... read more of other publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Time and Saturday Night. Coyne is also a long-time member of the CBC’s popular At Issue panel on The National.View author's profile